Nero looks at the burning Rome. The Great Fire of Rome was an urban fire that started on the night between 18 and 19 July in the year 64 AD. It is believed that Emperor Nero ordered the fire. He made the Christians responsible for it. Woodcut engraving from the book “Rom – Anfang, Fortgang, Ausbreitung und Verfall des Weltreichs der Römer , 3. Band (Rome – Beginning, progress, expansion, and decadence of the World Empire from the Romans, Volume 3”) by Dr. Wilhelm Waegner. Published by Otto Spamer, Leipzig in 1864.
The environment for the 1st century Jesus-followers in the Roman Empire was most interesting. How their love and their lives set themselves apart from those most broken … yet, they would not hate the broken, for most realized they had been most broken before Jesus’ love changed them from the inside out over time and were still “in process”.
Even when they were hated, blamed for everything and even killed they had a heart for others while taking up the sword as needed to protect self, family and property.
This all proved to positively impact the empire for generations to come.
“Some [pagan priests] would work themselves up in a lather of prophecy, indulging in “spectacular orgiastic rites.”
But copulation was not possible for the most celebrated of these:
“The Galli, men dressed as women, were servants of Cybele, the Mother Goddess who sat enthroned amid the highest peaks of Galatia….”
Next time someone claims to be transgendered, ask them if they take their belief this seriously:
“…and the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable of all the region’s gods was the severing with a knife or a sharp stone of their testicles.”
This is how Holland introduces the chapter entitled AD 19: Galatia.
But wait, there’s more!
… Then we come to Rome. Paul did not found this church, but perhaps his most influential letter was written to it. It was the Rome of Nero – who killed his mother, kicked his pregnant wife to death. Dressed as a woman, he married a man.
“In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things…
..A lake filled with sea monsters, brothels lined along the edge – staffed with a wide array of whores, ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For just one night, all were fair game – open to both the slave and the free man.”
According to Dio, Roman statesman and historian:
‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’
Why was this so? How was this possible? In the words of Holland, “…the potency of a Roman penis.”
“..Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. …to be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior….”
Can this be celebrated?
Look around you here in 2021 … you can’t say this is not celebrated as being the new normal.
Paul in his letter to his friends in Corinth back in the first century reminds Jesus-followers how they are different …
Demonstrating the clear distinction of Roman and Greek identity from that of the Christian (and from our sense of morality), Paul would offer, instead, that our bodies are members of Christ Himself. This is taken from 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul writes:
15 Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
Conclusion
In the summer of 64, a few weeks after Nero’s notorious street party, a deadly fire broke out in Rome. For days it raged.
Perhaps a third of the city was reduced to rubble. The Christians were blamed. Some, dressed in animal skins, were torn apart by animals; others lashed to crosses and used as torches.
Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, were two famous names. One was Peter. The other – beheaded, as befitted a Roman citizen – was Paul.
Shortly thereafter, the second temple was destroyed. ..”
We in 2021 are in similar times …
Four-Star Admiral Rachel Levine, U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps
.. be prepared!
Quite the mission field .. a dangerous one as well.
While most Americans put their faith in their their “king” (21st century equivalent – government “democracy”), there is an underlying aspect that eludes most people as they deal with the “crisis” of their lifetime (or so the media spins it as such). Most Americans have been ‘schooled’ into thinking that their government will keep them safe, and those that control the political puppets that the masses see, desire a way out of this global financial dead-end via a Great Reset.
However, Chuck Baldwin’s article calls into question whether this is a Great Reset OR a Great Spiritual Reset and concludes with this thought:
As long as Christians look to government organizations (America’s corporate “churches”), the longer it will take for God to bring spiritual restoration to our land.
The pulpits and churches of Colonial America—the churches and pulpits that led the colonies in a mighty awakening of both faith and freedom—were pulpits and churches that were unencumbered and unfettered with the chains of government dictation.
Before God can again raise up that courageous, independent voice, He must bury the rotting corpse of the enslaved, silent skeleton of these government organizations, formerly known as churches.
Yes, the Covid conspiracy has all but crushed the work ethic in this country. But this—as with everything associated with the phony Covid narrative—could not have happened had not the pulpits in this country abandoned the fearless, uncompromising preaching of God’s Holy Word.
But faint not, dear Christian friend: The great spiritual reset has begun.
Scary but exciting time to be alive, no? I would only add that the preaching of God’s Word needs to be accompanied by Jesus’ true followers loving others enough to share their hearts with those around them, to share how their relationship with their Creator gives them peace in the midst of the storm.
Hang on y’all .. surf’s up .. be wise as serpents and harmless as doves!
For far too long Christians have traded principles for safety. Even in the time of Israel’s ruling Judges as a theocracy, the masses clamored for a king. Trust in a God that “seems” distant when fickle people don’t get the life they had hoped for goes low and trust in monarchy, democracy and even totalitarianism goes high on the dreams these systems offer to the masses.
History shows vividly how all these earthly efforts fail, not only not panning out on the dreams of utopia, but in the end resulting in the murdering (outside of war) of 200M innocent citizens of some of these wicked totalitarian governments in the 20th century alone.
What follows is a rather long and hard to read clip from an article that announces the emerging new wave of grassroots Christianity that can impact this world in the months and years to come as it becomes obvious that governments are a cancer on the people dressed up to be their safety net.
Due to the new hostile sociopolitical realities, the third millennium is a time as well of new beginnings; it is a time of the clan and the small-faith community of families; and it a time when a new Christendom will be built (to the extent that it is built) solely on Christ an those clans and families. If any new Christian sociopolitical entities, even new countries, are to arise, they must arise anew and outside and beyond the demarcations of the past; outside and transcendent of the current sociopolitical powers-that-be; they must arise outside and in contradistinction to the world, the flesh, and the devil. This dawn of the third millennium requires the advent of a new Christian culture comprised of individual pastoral, that is grassroots, shoots that have made their way up among the ruins of an anti-Christic, dystopic world.
It is now, in this the third Christian age, that the lay faithful are called to grow up and out of the childhood of ages past. These faithful, these so-called “commoners” and “citizens,” are called to rise up fully mature, no longer holding onto props of the world, no longer dependent or subservient to powers and principalities, but only holding onto, dependent upon, and subservient to the Holy Cross. The third millennium is truly the age of the laity. It is the age of the laity because it is the age of the family and the imago Dei individual (the image of God as free rational-volitional beings) that comprises that family. And it is the age of the family and imago Dei individual because that family is being destroyed and the individual enslaved as never before; for in God’s economy “where sin abounds grace abounds more” (RM 5:20), the truth and good arising in direct contradiction to the prevalent falsehood and evil.
This is where the real value of Jesus-followers in the world demonstrate their value to those around them, by loving others selflessly but wisely. Wise as serpents, harmless as a dove. Being made in the image of God involves flipping tables in public places as well as protecting others from harm with swords bought with the proceeds of selling one’s cloak.
A new Christendom entails not the divine rights of elite kings and royal families, but rather the divine rights of the common man and the nuclear family. And these divine rights of the common lay faithful are absolute, for they derive from the faithful’s absolute right to do their duty to God, that is, their duty to abide by both natural and divine law, and indeed divine inspiration. But make no mistake, those that so abide by natural and divine law are outlaws to the Satanic State; a State that as such must be militantly engaged for “the whole salvation of the Church of Christ,” and most specifically and urgently for the salvation of the domestic church that is the family.
The toxicity of the anti-Christic third millennium requires that Christian piety and devotion no longer be squandered on a supposed but baseless duty to king, flag, or country. No longer should a romanticizing of a country’s past Christian heritage evoke allegiance to that country’s anti-Christic present. And no longer can a Christian justify a particular nationalism against a larger internationalism, for internationalism is but nationalism writ large. Rather, in the third-millennium, Christian piety, patriotism, loyalty, and devotion must be given to that which a person can truly know and so can truly love; and it is the Faith made tangible in the family, and the community of families, that one can truly know and love. It is neither countries, nor royal lineages, nor constitutions that God has immutably ordained, but rather it is the Holy Faith in grace and the sacrosanct family in both nature and grace that is God-ordained.
Christian’s must not give their hearts to a State. Again, they are called to be patriots only in so far as they are called to be pious. A Christian’s allegiance should be both familial and universal, not national and political. For familial allegiance is grass-rooted, as charity begins in the home; and universal allegiance justly transcends nations, as all men are created in God’s holy image (and indeed all men have families as well). But when a people’s allegiance is national and political the flower of their own nation’s familial foundation is inexorably conscripted and exterminated, while the families of opposing politics or nations are likewise afflicted.
Politics and nationalism are a scourge on society no matter how addicting the message is from these forces. In the end, it is never about the individual, it is about the collective.
Lastly, this is what a new disorganized, non-centered but grassroots effort to live life in and around the emerging police-military state that grows stronger by the day:
From home-grown produce, home-schooling, and cottage industries to Christian corporations, neighborhood militias, and patriarchal governing, the family and the extended community of families can in this technologically enhanced third millennium achieve a degree of self-sufficiency, independence, and perfection that was never before possible. But again, this will only be actualized if responsibility is assumed by fathers as the God-ordained leaders of natural and Christian society; it will only come to fruition if mothers are enthroned as the God-ordained center and heart of natural and Christian existence; and it will only thrive if individual Christians uncompromisingly exert their absolute right to dutifully heed their God-ordained conscience informed by natural and revealed truths.
People of character, given just in time courage directly from God, can and will give hope to those marginalized by the centralized and global evil forces that are in motion around this planet. God’s direct comms, His still small voice, will be heard by His children in these days.
From the great political philosopher Ringo Starr (Beatles):
Everything government touches turns to crap.
If you can think of a worse way to handle a “novel” virus, please tell me. Apparently, government leaders at all levels were duped into believing the worse from entities that have the s**tiest track records .. the WHO, CDC and Bill Gates.
Who allowed them to make those decisions? (No pun intended) No one stood in their way, not the constitutions (state or federal), not the legislatures (state or federal), not corporations (thanks corporatism/crap-italism), not the medical/science sectors (thanks for not sharing the truth, except for the few whose You Tube and Facebook comms got yanked) and not the people, except for the few that dared tell truth to power and were labeled conspiracy theorists or right-wing gun toting thugs (who NEVER resorted to violence).
On the heels of the Covid-19 debacle comes sparked civil unrest, again used to make the people heel and to cause further damage to the grassroots economy. The government (state and federal) loves being the “middleman” in this matrix of division, their own political agenda gets traction (whether it is the police state / military totalitarianism effort OR the welfare state (individual/corporate) that will serve to secure a permanent slave class that will be happy for food and social security in exchange for them wearing masks, getting vaccines (marginally tested) and bowing down to the state).
Either way, totalitarianism seems to be the way of the future, not only in the US but also in every country that were exposed to be prime slave-class material for bowing down to the Covid-19 lock-downs. That’s a fact jack, the Marxist/Socialist/Communist agenda in the US is alive and well. However, there is hope!
By far the best antidote to this totalitarian virus is a combination of critical thinking, a liberty/freedom mindset that will refuse to initiate violence (but is more than willing to actively protect self, family and property as well as the pursuit of happiness) and finally a trust in a loving Creator that weeps for this broken word whose Love can make a HUGE different in the middle of a totalitarian empire. The 1st century Jesus followers were BIG on caring for the hurting, helping families bury their dead and loving on them, encouraging others with hope in a hopeless world and making other curious as to “what made them tick”. Understanding God’s Love INDIVIDUALLY towards each of them (individuals, not groups) actually fueled them to love on others in a selfless way.
Being brought up in ”Christian” Germany with churches everywhere, I have always felt that there must be something exciting about the Church which Jesus started and about which I read in the New Testament – but somehow I have yet to discover what it is. I dreamed – together with many friends and colleagues, of a church, that is as simple as One-Two-Three, yet is dynamic; an explosive thing, able to turn the world and a neighborhood upside down. The church as a supernatural invention; endowed with God’s gift of immortality; the way to disciple each other, and to transfer the life of Jesus to each other. An experience of grace and grapes, love and laughter, joy and jellybeans, forgiveness and fun, power and – yes, why not, paper. A church, which does not need much finances, rhetoric, control and manipulation, which can do without powerful and charismatic heroes, which is non-religious at heart, which can thrill people to the core, make them loose their head for joy, and simply teach us The Way to live. The church which not only has a message, but is the message; which spreads like an unstoppable virus, infects whatever it touches, and ultimately covers the Earth with the glory and knowledge of God. It’s power stems from it’s inventor,who has equipped it with the most genius spiritual genetical code – a sort of heavenly DNA, which allows it to transfer and reproduce Kingdom values from Heaven to Earth, and transform not only water into wine, but atheists into fascinated apostles,policewomen into prophetesses, terrorists into teachers, plumbers into pastors, and dignified village elders into beaming evangelists in the process. It is like a spiritual family – organic, not organized, relational, not formal; it has a persecution-proof structure, matures under tears, multiplies under pressure, grows under the carpet,flourishes in the desert, sees in the dark, and thrives on chaos. A church that can multiply like two fish and five breads in the Hands of Jesus, were the fathers turn their hearts to the sons and the sons their hearts to the fathers, were it’s people are t’s resources, and which has only one name to brag about, the Lamb of God.
You may wonder why I bring this up. I think it is something that a politician said in the past week that will be used to drive fear deep into the heart of many American, even some or many “Christian” Americans when he said: “There is nothing worse than death”.
This is true for those who see this world as all there is, as this is THEIR one shot to GET everything they can out of this experience. (no wonder so many are so self-centered in getting what they “deserve”) When one has this mindset, it is no wonder why people get desperate enough that when they are told they have not voice, that they feel a religious zeal to loot and pillage other people’s property without a second thought. They are also told that the police are the problem, placing a target on every uniformed police officer while they fail to realize that 1 in 6 “protestors” are in fact undercover police. Government police (just like any corporate entity linked tightly to government) is a recipe for disaster since all monopolies NEVER have a good “customer service side”. Others will say the rioters are the problem and the military should be brought in once and for all to institute Martial Law (I know Tom Cotton, you would LOVE to see the US become the Iraq you knew and loved when the US Empire occupied that country based on a lie).
Missing in all this discussion is the government(s) and their enablers (the elite, including the global elite) role in the the continued rollout of these fear-based events. The CIA’s disinformation campaign since the 1950s is working fabulously on the public school educated so-called adults that could not add 2+2. The inability to critically think and identify the root of the crisis (manufactured) we face in 2020 causes them to be willing servants to the masters who hope to remake this nation as well as the world in the image they have in their minds. These elites do not think like us, they have evil intentions but are never aware of it because sociopaths are like that, you would never understand.
Being wise as serpents and harmless as doves does not mean we fold when power from earthly kings gets applied. Jesus was wise in that he was able to demonstrate power under control, as He was meek but never weak. His M.O. included being elusive in His daily life, with a small group he would engage in dialog with just a few, or thousands in a spontaneous way. He was crafty enough to evade BOTH the religious (politically aligned) and civil authorities and Roman Empire occupiers while never hunkering down for very long. His mission was about the next generation, to impart just enough love and knowledge so that his followers would turn the Roman Empire upside-down, not with violence, but with truth and love.
At its core, “Christianity” was never created to be a religion, as Wolfgang Simson explains:
Before they where called Christians, followers of Christ have been called”The Way”. One of the reasons was, that they have literally found ”the way to live.” The nature of Church is not reflected in a constant series of religious meetings lead by professional clergy in holy rooms specially reserved to experience Jesus, but in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their everyday life in spiritual extended families as a vivid answer to the questions society faces, at the place where it counts most: in their homes
People were never his enemy, but earthly powers (government and religious) that oppressed the innocent people were. It was clear that a majority that thought he would lead an armed revolution abandoned Him the last week of his earthly life. It was only the minority, the remnant who would humbly remain faithful in working themselves out of a job in imparting Life to the next generation, a Life that can give joy in the midst of the storms of life.
Hang in there y’all, please don’t get caught up in all the fear-based stuff, it is never healthy for the body or the soul. Please take time to be with friends and family no matter what arbitrary rules these totalitarians might lay down. Jesus said:
Nolonger do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. – The Bible – John 15:15
So even if we become physical slaves in some future state here on earth, we have a Brother and a Friend who knows what it is like to be oppressed and misunderstood. May He give you peace in the middle of this government induced virus that will be used to hide all their financial, judicial and ethical sins of the past 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200+ years.
1938 USA Communist Party Convention -Abraham Lincoln as centerpiece
Like most people my age, #60+, I can remember a time when we all were a LOT more free. Rifles in the pickup trucks, shooting guns near suburban neighborhoods, playing outside ALL day with the parents not really knowing where their kids were at. This was all “normal”.
Also during this time, it was the college campuses that allowed and even encouraged thinking and expressing one’s own thoughts no matter how popular they might be. Anti-government speech was not just tolerated, it was at the heart of what it meant to be an American, the Spirit of ’76!
Well those days are long gone, and the transition to where we are today was not a linear one at all. At first there was some minor deviation, but in the past 5-10 years, the college campuses are more group-think than ever, where the narrative of the day is king, where thought police thrive.
This is not the first time this has happened, but it does seem to be the first time it has happened without a war in the past 150 years, but it does have some similarities to a time in American history over 220 years ago where the thought police surfaced, when the “Land of the Free” enacted the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798 which …:
made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing – even if true – about the president or the federal government
You see, freedom of speech is a natural, God-given right that governments can and will take away. In the “Land of the Free” in 1798, there were many who took issue with this course change that occurred only 22 years after the thirteen American colonies sought independence from the British Empire. When Thomas Jefferson became president, he and his administration repealed this act. However, one this course change is embedded in a nation’s/empire’s DNA, there is no going back:
Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.
In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants and gives those warrants the patriotic and harmless-sounding name of national security letters (NSLs). This authorization is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that that security can only be violated by a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based upon probable cause of crime.
To most libertarians, this is where we are today, where the government has successfully transitioned the US Empire to a static point where the “Land of the Free” is no more. However, there is yet another effort that has been made in the past five years or so to continue the transition towards a totalitarian state, and this one comes from the corporate side of Lincoln’s dream of mercantilism, where government and big corporations become two wings of the same bird.
– Murray Rothbard on Mercantilism
As Rod Dreher of Russian Insider indicates in this article, “A Russian Woman Working as a College Professor in the US Writes About the Sovietization of Amerika”, it seems that it is the former citizens of the old USSR are the most sensitized to this trend the most while typical Americans see this as no big deal, much like the Germans in 1930’s Germany as the Nazi’s came to power.
Clarissa [not her real name] is a college professor who emigrated to the US from Russia as a young woman, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She is yet another ex-Soviet bloc person who is extremely anxious about the emergence of soft totalitarianism here. Of course she can’t use her real name, because she fears professional retaliation. It should tell us something that not a single academic from a former communist country that I interviewed for this book was willing to speak using their own name — this, in the Land of the Free. Why not? Because they were afraid of facing professional consequences for speaking out against identity politics and the “social justice” regime.
I am pretty sure if I were to chart out freedom in the USA, we are now at an all-time low as both the government and corporate America are actively seeking out dissenters to the latest narratives. The tools are in place to “take out” people professionally both in social media attacks:
Totalitarianism is something that takes away from people the unbearable burden of freedom. It allows many people to hound and persecute with impunity. That is pleasant in many senses. There was a practice in the Soviet Union where people would be told to get together in groups at work and write letters to the newspaper to denounce famous poets or artists. We see that today in Twitter. People love that because it allows a little person to completely destroy somebody who has done something great.
.. as well inside universities and corporations with diversity and sensitivity training in the workplaces:
All your co-workers are enemies. Either they can get you in trouble, or they are out to destroy you with an accusation. It destroys all sorts of uncontrollable communities – friendship, families, church communities. When you set people against each other, they are much easier to control. This is what it was like under totalitarianism.
So one might think I just need to be more careful about what I share in certain social circles. But that is not how this works, to see how any flavor of totalitarianism actually works, we need to learn from those who lived there:
… wokeness in corporate America is a weapon used by white-collar professionals to weed out competitors for increasingly scarce jobs. She said, “People find ideological purity tests useful to weed out people who compete for jobs you cover. Progressive forces are completely allied with globalist capitalism.”
She also said that people have no idea how vulnerable they are to this mindset, because of social media. “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow. You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works. This is why people like me are so upset today.
One would think that at least the church might be a place where one can be real in this regard. Anyone who understands the 1st century church, it was the underground Christians in the Roman Empire that actually turned the then-known-world upside-down NOT with violence or revolution, but with love of their neighbor where .. :
[NOTE: It seems that true “diversity” does not focus on division based on race, sex or anything else. A true team sees each unique God-created individual as part of the crew that can help to keep the ship afloat.]
Well, a note of caution, most of the churches today, especially ones with government registration in place (501c3), are part of the corporate woke-ness effort underway in this country. Most of the church of today bears little resemblance to the church in the generation after Jesus was killed by religion and empire.
Until this trend is reversed, the ‘circle of trust’ is going to get mighty small. Take your time in knowing who your friends are, it is better to be lonely than to be a fresh target for either empire or corporate-elite.
